Alejandro Adams‘ second feature, Canary, is a wildly ambitious and not particularly audience-friendly (in fact, you could almost call it audience-hostile) work of indie sci-fi with new-fangled digital aesthetics and old-fashioned Altman-esque dialogue patterns put to the service of an overwhelming and surprisingly fresh-feeling sense of dystopian dread. The film premieres at CineQuest on Sunday. I watched it on my MacBook while flying from New York to Los Angeles last week. Adams thinks it’s important that I mention that. He says, “I’m glad you watched it on an airplane…that is not merely a valid way to watch my film; that IS my film. I reject all other modes of consumption because they unmake what I made. What I made was for Karina Longworth on that flight from New York to Los Angeles.”
In an ongoing email conversation, I started out by asking Alejandro a variation of one of The 5 Questions We Ask Everybody; he took over from there, eventually pushing me to the point where I felt the need to invoke Heidegger, which I usually try really hard not to do. Canary’s screening schedule can be found here; there have also been some interesting conversations on the film’s blog.
When we do our festival preview interviews, I always start out by asking the filmmaker to “Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.” This almost always produces interesting answers, but in the case of Canary, I’m *really* interested in what you might say, because for me, the film is pretty much about “what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.” Yes? No? How would you answer that standard question?
In another interview I said that Canary’s art film DNA could be traced to Celine and Julie Go Boating and its dystopian satire DNA could be traced to Brazil. Whoever likes those films would probably find something to like in Canary. That answer is not at all fair to the film, but it’s fair to a prospective viewer. Nothing else I say in this interview will be fair to the viewer.
“On paper” Canary is about organ harvesting and redistribution. On screen I think it’s so dense with recondite metaphors that it would be nearly impossible to think of it in terms of a plot description.
It seems like you’re using an unusually large cast for a film at this budgetary level. Where do you find actors? How do you approach working with them? Do you give them a traditional script, or is it more of an improvisation process?
Do you think there was any way to verbalize the true nature of this film to the cast? Do you think they knew what kind of film they were making? Of course not. Neither did the cast of [Adams' first feature] Around the Bay.
As for how I “handle” the cast, it’s a series of delicate manipulations–as I said, they don’t even know what film they’re really making. Often they show up without knowing anything about the scene or about the other characters. No one, including Carla Pauli, who plays the lead, knew where the film was “going.” Do you think a handful of parents would wittingly bring their preschool-aged daughters to be in the film you watched?
One “performer” in Canary didn’t know we were making a narrative film at all–which I can’t really talk about because there are some legal ramifications. So there’s the level on which I’m being deceitful and duplicitous with the cast, the level on which the cast is complicit in my deceitfulness and duplicity with a non-actor who doesn’t know the real reason he’s being filmed, and finally, of course, I’m being deceitful and duplicitous with the viewer.
Do you have any moral qualms about that? Setting aside any outstanding legal issues that you can’t talk about, how do actors tend to react once they’ve seen the finished product?
I think my ethical squirrelliness is worth discussing, certainly, but I’d probably have to be on the receiving end of a lecture in order to see my actions clearly. I think what I do is the opposite of, say, Carlos Reygadas, who on two occasions has involved non-actors who “know what they’re getting into” and then are stigmatized and ostracized by their cloistered real-life communities–and families!–due to their involvement in his films. I think that’s horrible. No film is worth such repercussions. Reygadas is talking people into doing something that’s bad for them, personally, in the long run. I’m talking people into doing something that’s better for them in the long run, career-wise, than the project they think they’re making would be.
What I mean by that is: they get a good review in an industry publication instead of getting laughs from an audience. Talk to honest, self-aware actors, and they’ll admit that their primary concern is audience laughter–or the dramatic equivalent, tears. It would never occur to them that forty-eight hours after a “bad screening” their name might be mentioned in a prominent positive review. The important thing is to ensure that some reviews appear before cast and crew see the final product. That’s why I don’t do cast/crew screenings. They need to be aware that someone, somewhere, who is qualified to pronounce on matters related to cinema has said that it’s good. After that, they really don’t care what they see on screen…
So, yeah, I’m manipulative and deceitful, but when an actor says to you, “All the romantic comedies I’ve participated in are stuck in post-production and they’ll never see the light of day,” and you give him a role that gets his name in Variety, he tends to skip the intermediate steps of, one, “I can’t believe this film is actually screening somewhere!” and, two, “I would never have participated in that film had I known it would end up being like that!”
As I look forward to SXSW as the next festival that I cover in depth, I’m thinking a lot about the reputation of that festival, and the interconnections of various filmmakers who have shown work there over the last five years. This will be your second consecutive year premiering at CineQuest. Is there a sense of a “CineQuest commuity”? How would you describe the festival to filmmakers, critics, potential attendees who aren’t familiar with it?
I started attending Cinequest in 2002, after the festival had been going for more than a decade. My first and most durable impression was that the programming range was incredible–so much so that the festival really resists classification. Because of that, “interconnections” among filmmakers at Cinequest are perforce kept to a minimum. There are no other Alejandro Adamses at the festival, and that’s as it should be. I understand that they present themselves as a “discovery festival,” which means you get a lot of films that were rejected from more prestigious festivals.
I didn’t submit Canary to any festivals. I consulted with a critic I respect and he said, basically, festival audiences won’t know what to do with it, and no programmer will want to touch it. I agreed. Besides, despite encomiums from Variety, indieWIRE, Phillip Lopate, and others, Around the Bay had failed to play more than a single festival. I wasn’t interested in going through the motions for a film that was less accessible and, despite its genre pretensions, far more personal.
I realize my way of thinking about films is inverted from almost everyone else’s. I make films because I hate films. And I feel safe telling you that because you hate films too. You’re a critic, not a cineaste (or, more colloquially, a “cinephile”). And I’m a filmmaker, not a cineaste. Mencken maintained that the critical impulse and the artistic impulse are the same. A buff’s review will never look like a critic’s review because a buff doesn’t care if cinema gets any better–the critic is the family doctor, the buff is the drinking buddy. I’m fortunate to know some real critics, as vicious as they are perspicacious. It’s probably a foregone conclusion that they’re my core fanbase. One glance at my films and they can see I hate films as much as they do.
I don’t hate films. I have hated individual films, and I hate certain tendencies in film, as it were. I am obstinately not part of fanboy/girl culture — but some of them throw around more hate than most critics I know, so I’m not sure if the distinction is useful. I like to think that I’m more down with a Heideggerean ideal of thinking as an affirmative act than anything else. I really believe it’s more about love than anything else.
Cocteau said that the spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. I think sincere artists and critics always embody this maxim. But I don’t think that opposes your Heideggerian ideal. Hating films begets the spirit of contradiction which begets the spirit of creation–a Moebius strip in which “hate” and “love,” “creation” and “contradiction” are inextricable from one another. This whole Greek-inflected obsession with taxonomy and classification and hair-splitting is my least favorite bit of Western intellectual baggage. We need a more organic, intuitive, even sensory means of arriving at truths. My impetuousness–or carelessness–with words can probably be traced to my own frustrated efforts in that regard.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth